C-
Blizzards, tornados and floods–oh, my! It’s absurd that this new big-budget disaster epic from Roland Emmerich, director of that masterpiece of subtlety “Independence Day,” should have become the subject of intense political debate. “The Day After Tomorrow” may use global warming as its plot key, the thing that unleashes waves of devastation on the world, but nobody could possibly think that it treats the issue with the slightest degree of intelligence or insight. The movie is just a brainless orgy of special effects periodically interrupted by sappy human-interest episodes; it’s founded on the shakiest dramatic ground, and for anyone to become seriously exercised over it, pro or con, is about as plausible as if “Armageddon” had been protested by a group called “Asteroids ’R Us.” No Irwin Allen movie ever depicted so much mindless mayhem, or fielded such an army of stock characters to perish or make breathless escapes from impending destruction.
The two main stick figures in the mix are Jack Hall (an overwrought, pained-looking Dennis Quaid), a scientist whose research in Antarctica has persuaded him that the earth may be on the brink of a new Ice Age, ushered in by climatic disasters all over the world. He tries futilely to persuade the national administration to take emergency measures in an attempt to head off the catastrophe, but he’s got to fight an uncomprehending bureaucracy–led by a supremely dismissive vice president–at the same time that he tries to rescue his high school-age son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal, looking much too old for the role) from New York City, where the kid is trapped as the metropolis experiences severe flooding, dangerously falling temperatures and massive snowfall. Various other barely recognizable faces pop up among the tidal waves, hailstorms, hurricanes, and other assorted phenomena (among them, if you can believe it, marauding wolves!)–Emmy Rossum (as the sweet girl Sam worships from afar), Dash Mihok (as Jack’s young assistant), Jay O. Sanders (as his old one), Sela Ward (as Jack’s wife, a nurse who puts her own life on the line to care for an adorable young cancer patient), Tamlyn Tomita (as a NASA scientist), et al.–but they’re all just bits of potential human debris looking concerned and endangered amidst the rubble. Lending a note of impish gravity against Quaid’s frenzied excess and Gyllenhaal’s gangly heroism is Ian Holm, as a British scientist who comments on the dire situation from his cavernous enclave in Scotland, whence he issues messages of doom and gloom in that well-known clipped voice of his while keeping a stiff upper lip till his generator putters out.
The New York segments of “The Day After Tomorrow” are basically “Godzilla” (another Emmerich effort) without the dinosaur–lots of destruction of well-known landmarks, with wailing winds, walls of water and ice and snow replacing the growls and stomping feet of a big lizard. None of the actors are important, and they go through their paces about as memorably as Tommy Lee Jones did in “Volcano” (this sort of picture is hardly a vehicle for thespian depth). The only issue is whether the special effects make the grade. The answer, in a nutshell, is that they’re good enough, but pretty redundant and not terribly exciting; once you’ve watched one wave splashing over traffic or skyscraper being dismembered by gales, the sight tends to lose impact, and vast ice-covered vistas over which ant-sized humans are trudging aren’t visually entrancing even when the Chrysler Building looms up out of them. The result is rather like watching a video game that’s decided to do completely without the interactive element; what’s the point? In between the big weather-related moments are banal episodes of scientific technobabble, youthful romance, political infighting and courageous self-sacrifice, all marked by dialogue that’s equal parts melodramatic twaddle and juvenile gallows humor. The goal is to string all the elements together in a chain that increases in tension as it goes; but in actuality the narrative grows more and more preposterous and illogical as it proceeds. An insanely bombastic score by Harald Kloser tries to pump things up, but it only adds to the air of the ridiculous, particularly when it slims down to a booming thuds at particularly nerve-wracking moments.
About the only thing in “The Day After Tomorrow” that you might find entertaining, depending on your political point of view, is the characterization of the President (Perry King) as a clueless empty suit and the Vice President (Kenneth Welsh) as a hard-bitten control freak to whom his “boss” mostly defers and who resolutely espouses economic arguments against the doom-saying of environmental alarmists. Of course, these are cartoonish versions of the real thing, but they will have some plausibility for viewers of a certain political persuasion–until the V.P., thrust into the top job, learns humility and the danger of fooling with Mother Nature after the world has been ushered into a new Ice Age, and is suddenly transformed into a enlightened fellow. Here the political observations of the picture, crude as they might have been, enter the goofy Fantasy Land that the rest of the picture has inhabited from the very first frame, and even the sole oasis of real humor the flick enjoyed disappears in a wallow of forced uplift.
My advice about the movie is the same as that which the frightened government is finally persuaded to issue to all residents of the northern states concerning the megastorm that’s socking their region: Just stay in your houses until it blows over.